Multiple Sclerosis, Wearables, and Health Data Sovereignty | Blush & Bloom Podcast | Ep. 42

Autoimmune disease affects a huge share of women, yet it remains one of the least understood corners of medicine. Nearly 80% of autoimmune patients are women, and for most of them there is still no clear answer to the questions that matter most: what triggers a flare, what calms one, and what it actually takes to recover.

In this episode of Blush & Bloom, host Gigi Kenneth talks with Dr. Sabine Seymour, founder of Regenerative Punk and one of the earliest voices in wearable technology. Dr. Sabine coined the term "fashiontech," was a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York for almost 20 years, and has spent roughly three decades building wearables, starting with body area networks before Bluetooth existed.

She also lives with Multiple Sclerosis. In 2024 she marked 20 years since a diagnosis that, within 48 hours, put her in a wheelchair and left her speech paralysed. Together, Gigi and Dr. Sabine explore what her recovery taught her, why autoimmune disease is so poorly served by both medicine and femtech, and what it would take to build wearables that keep women's health data in their own hands.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Building wearable technology since the mid-1990s, long before it was a category
• What the wearables and data industry keeps getting wrong
• What Regenerative Punk is and why Dr. Sabine launched it
• Living with and regenerating from Multiple Sclerosis
• Which data points actually matter for autoimmune disease
• Data privacy and sovereignty in women's health
• Her vision for a bio-based, on-device wearable that keeps your data yours

Who Is Dr. Sabine Seymour?

Dr. Sabine Seymour describes herself as a creative scientist, a cultural strategist, and a data economist. She has worked in wearables since the mid-1990s, first in sports and then in healthcare, running a boutique New York consultancy that partnered with companies like Nike, Intel, and Disney at a time when almost no one understood why anyone would put technology into clothing.

"I'm a creative scientist and a cultural strategist and a data economist because it's much easier to describe it in those three terms."

That long view shapes how she reads the field today. Much of what looks new, she argues, has been attempted before.

Why Does the Wearables Industry Keep Repeating Itself?

Because history gets neglected. Dr. Sabine sees products, write-ups, and projects arrive as if for the first time, when many of the same ideas were tried a decade or more ago. Her advice is simple: look at what has already been built in the space, learn why earlier attempts stalled, and stop reinventing the wheel.

That principle runs through Regenerative Punk. Rather than build yet another device, the aim is to partner with companies that already collect useful data and to work out which signals actually count.

What Is Regenerative Punk?

Regenerative Punk is the movement Dr. Sabine launched in December 2025 to demystify the science of autoimmune disease, especially for women. It grew directly out of her own story. After she shared publicly that she has MS, women wrote to her constantly, asking how she recovered, what she did, and which doctors she saw.

It brings together everything from her career: wearables, data, healthcare, design, and the hard question of how you bring something to market that does not exist yet. At its centre is a belief that education comes first, and that data and partnerships come next.

Regenerating From Multiple Sclerosis

Dr. Sabine speaks about her MS with striking candour. The acute attack was fast and severe.

"I ended up within 48 hours in a wheelchair and speech paralyzed and my entire right side was paralyzed."

What followed was not a single cure but years of exploration. She had access to an exceptional neurologist willing to experiment, and she tried many things, some that helped and some that harmed. Certain treatments backfired badly. Others eased her symptoms. Over time she compiled hundreds of interventions across the medical, dietary, physical, and mental into a personal "list" that Regenerative Punk is publishing in its first zine.

She is careful about how she frames this. Every autoimmune patient is different, so the point is not to hand anyone a formula. As she puts it, it is important that you create your own list, keeping what feels right for your body and leaving what does not. This is her lived experience, not medical advice, and she is clear that recovery also took resilience, stubbornness, and a good deal of access and luck that not everyone has.

Which Health Data Actually Matters for Autoimmune Disease?

Very little of it is being tracked at all. Dr. Sabine explains that autoimmune patients generate almost no real-world evidence data, and the femtech tools that do exist rarely connect to one another. The first task is to identify which data points from different devices are genuinely essential, then find a way to consolidate them so they can produce insight rather than sit in separate silos.

Hormonal fluctuations, she notes, are a clear example of something worth understanding, yet the tools to track how they influence symptoms are still emerging.

Why Does Data Sovereignty Matter in Women's Health?

Because health data can be used against the people it belongs to. Dr. Sabine points to fears around period-tracking data being exposed or misused, and argues that women should be able to access their own health data at all times and keep it under their control. That, she says, needs real legal frameworks, not just good intentions.

"I believe that we need to be much more careful about data sovereignty within the healthcare space."

She is encouraged by European privacy frameworks and sees on-device computing, where data stays on the wearable instead of being sent to the cloud, as a technical path toward keeping health data private by design.

A Bio-Based, Agentic Wearable

Dr. Sabine's future vision pulls these threads together: a wearable made from bio-based materials that are kinder to the body and the environment, paired with an agentic AI that acts like a personal digital twin and computes on the device itself. Instead of shipping your data to a server, it would gather your biometrics, environment, and lifestyle signals locally, helping you understand your own trigger points before you get sick, and helping you keep ownership of everything it learns.

FAQ

Who is Dr. Sabine Seymour? She is a creative scientist, cultural strategist, and data economist who coined the term "fashiontech," taught at Parsons School of Design for nearly 20 years, and has built wearable technology since the mid-1990s. She is the founder of Regenerative Punk.

What is Regenerative Punk? A movement Dr. Sabine launched in December 2025 to demystify the science of autoimmune disease for women, combining education, data, partnerships, and community, and sharing what she learned from her own recovery.

Why is autoimmune disease considered a women's health issue? Nearly 80% of autoimmune patients are women, yet the conditions remain under-researched and poorly understood, leaving many women without clear answers about triggers or treatment.

What does data sovereignty mean in women's health? It means women being able to access their own health data at all times and control who else can use it, supported by legal frameworks and, ideally, technology that keeps data on the device rather than in the cloud.

Does the episode offer medical advice? No. Dr. Sabine shares her personal experience with MS and recovery. It is not a treatment plan, and anyone managing a chronic or autoimmune condition should work with their own clinicians.

💬 Final Thoughts

Dr. Sabine Seymour's story is a reminder that behind every dataset is a person trying to understand her own body. Her work asks femtech to do better on two fronts at once: to take autoimmune disease in women seriously, and to build the kind of technology that gives women both insight and ownership. When those two things meet, health data stops being something done to women and becomes something that genuinely serves them.

👥 Connect with the Guest

Dr. Sabine Seymour: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabineseymour

Gigi Kenneth (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/gigikenneth

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